Nadar comfortably outlived all his famous contemporaries. In 1900, when he was eighty, a spry old man still very upright, with a mane of silver hair, a huge retrospective exhibition of his photos was held in Paris. To coincide with this, he published some early memoirs, much of them written twenty or thirty years previously, under the title: Quand j’étais photographe. This is a remarkable little volume—surprisingly it has never been translated—full of mischievous anecdotes about his many sitters, particularly the vanity of ancient generals and politicians, posing before the camera. He observes typically that when a husband and wife came to collect family photographs the husband invariably looked at those of himself first; while the wife always asked to see those of her husband. It was the definition, he said mockingly, of a good French bourgeois marriage. Poets, on the other hand, were frightened of their own photographs, and only liked to gaze on those of their mistresses or actress-flames. As for actresses themselves, they were the easiest and least self-conscious of sitters, for they already knew—from hours of careful study—exactly the weaknesses and strengths of their features. Actresses had the least illusions of all.
There was one sentence in this gossipy memoir of Nadar’s that took me by surprise. In fact, it took my breath away. In talking about Baudelaire and Gautier, Nadar casually mentioned how different their noble, expressive faces looked by comparison with the poor, battered visage of their friend and fellow-poet Gérard de Nerval. Poor Gerard’s face, said Nadar, was marked equally by the memory of lunatic asylums and the foreboding of his tragic death. “Within a few days of this photograph, the only one that was ever taken of our beloved friend, he had committed suicide in that accursed backstreet down by the Seine, the rue de la Vieille Lanterne.” The man who had introduced Nadar to journalism, and the first steps of his brilliant Parisian career, had himself died in poverty and obscurity by his own hand.
This discovery went through me like an electric pulse, and in a moment had rearranged all the diverse elements of the 1850s into the story I had unconsciously been looking for. It was based on a paradox, or a series of contradictions: between success and failure, between material and spiritual values, between recognition and obscurity, between the social and the solitary, between bourgeois and bohemian, between reality and dreams. But above all, Nerval’s death seemed to hint at the ultimate historical fate of the Romantic spirit in Europe, that chimera I had been half-consciously pursuing for so long.
The evening I read Nadar’s description, I left the Bibliothèque Nationale early and hurried through the lamplit colonnades of the Palais-Royal, across the place Royal and the dark gulf of the place du Louvre. It was a January evening, a cold wind blowing, with no tourists along the Seine. I ran across the pont des Arts (not yet removed) into the maze of little backstreets behind the quai des Grands Augustins to a second-hand bookshop I knew. The Mandragore, lit by Chinese lanterns, plastered with astrological posters, reeking of incense, carried a good stock of nineteenth-century texts traded in by students from the Sorbonne for cult-books, ecology pamphlets, and bandes dessinées. Here I bought my first well-thumbed livre de poche of Nerval, with marks of coffee-cups on the cover. For the first time—in that pungent half-light, with the rain suddenly beating on the windows—I read the poem of his life, “El Desdichado” (“The Disinherited”), which begins:
Je suis le Ténébreux,—le Veuf—L’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie:
Ma seule Etoile est morte—et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
The words were simple and direct, as of someone introducing himself with an apologetic smile. Yet the images were strange, a kind of medieval heraldry, proud and desperate, like John Keats’s knight—“alone and palely loitering”. Nerval seemed to be introducing himself like a Prince out of a forgotten fairy-tale or Arthurian legend: behind him stands a shattered ancestral Tower, above him a burnt-out Star, and at his side a medieval lute emblazoned with a Black Sun. What did all these symbols mean? They carried overtones of destruction and loss; but they also had a luminous beauty about them, something other-worldly and gracious. It was difficult to connect them with the shrewd journalist who had marched into Alphonse Karr’s newspaper offices with Nadar “under his arm”.
Moreover, though the words appeared simple they were in fact extraordinarily difficult to translate into English prose with any real accuracy:
I am the man of shadows—the man in the shadows—the man of darkness—the man lost in the dark—the shadowy man you cannot see. I am the Widower; I am the Unconsoled, the disconsolate, the grief-stricken man. I am the Prince of Aquitaine (that region of south-west France between Bordeaux and Toulouse, through which the rivers Garonne and Dordogne run). I am the Prince with the abolished, shattered, stricken, or blasted Tower; or the Prince standing by that Tower. My only Star is dead, burnt-out, extinguished—the noun is feminine. And my star-studded lute, or my lute marked with the constellations, or the zodiac signs; my lute carries, or is emblazoned with, the Black Sun of Melancholy or Melancholia.
Puzzling over these four mysterious lines in the Mandragore, I remembered how T. S. Eliot had used one of them in the famous last passage of The Waste Land; and he had not dared to translate:
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down …
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
I held a fragment in my hand. The rain poured steadily now. Somewhere between the doorway of the Mandragore and the brightly lit publicity photos of the cinema Saint-André-des-Arts round the corner I had abandoned my novel.
2
Proust called Nerval one of the three or four most important French writers of the nineteenth century. Yet to me, and I suspected to most other English readers, he was virtually unknown—certainly of a different order of magnitude to contemporaries like Baudelaire, Balzac, Dumas or Gautier. Almost the only thing that everyone knew about him was the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, story of how he used to go for walks in the parks of Paris taking a live lobster with him on a leash. This crazy anecdote was meant to sum up his reputation as a charming but lunatic poet; though in fact it sounds more like the thing one of the dandy-poseurs of the bohème doré of the 1830s would have done, in order to make a name for himself and épater les bourgeois, or shock the middle-classes, as was the fashion. It took me some time to track down the real source of this story, and when I did it gained an altogether different significance.
It was told by Nerval’s oldest friend, Théophile Gautier, who had known him since early schooldays at the Lycée Charlemagne where they were pupils together. They had shared a theatre column in the daily newspaper La Presse during the 1830s and ′40s, signing it “G.G.” for “Gautier et Gérard”; and Gautier had often put Nerval up at his apartment in Paris, or visited him in clinics during the bad times of his madness. Gautier was in fact Nerval’s closest professional colleague, as well as being something like a brother to him; it was Gautier who was called down to the public mortuary to identify Nerval’s body on the morning of his suicide. “My collaborator,” Gautier called him, “and the faithful companion of my brightest—and above all my darkest—days.” Gautier understood Nerval as well as anyone.
Gautier told the lobster story, not as an example of Nerval’s exhibitionism or fashionable flamboyance—it soon became clear that Nerval was the most retiring and secretive of men—but as an example of his friend’s obsession with symbols, and the extraordinary power of his inner imaginative life. The whole point, said Gautier, was that Nerval thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. “He could not conceive why the doctors should be concerned if he happened to choose to walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal leading a live lobster along on the end of a blue silk ribbon.” When questioned about it, Nerval would answer quite rationally, dismissing all the ridiculous animals that smart Pari
sians chose for pets, and producing his own beautifully poetic reasons for preferring his lobster, as a symbol of true friendship:
Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn’t mad!
Strange as Gautier’s account is, and funny too, it does seem to be confirmed by Nerval’s letters. He was fascinated by curious animals, especially exotic birds, insects and fish, and frequently used them symbolically in his work. He had great respect for the mythology of such ancient civilisations as the Egyptian, which assigned symbolic roles to creatures like the scarab beetle and the cat. He was very fond of parrots, and they appear as symbols of wisdom and memory in his stories. Often, on his wanderings through Paris, he would leave messages for his friends in the form of animals; and in his last desperate years I found that several surprised writers had come home to find lobsters or parrots waiting with a startled concierge, “a present from Monsieur Gérard de Nerval”. All this seemed to promise a fine vein of tragi-comedy in Nerval’s story.
But there was a further, and possibly darker consideration. Gautier was a brilliant journalist, and unlike his friend made an immensely successful career as a literary columnist, first in La Presse and later in the official paper Le Moniteur. He campaigned on behalf of the poets and painters he admired, continually attacking the values of his staid, bourgeois readership, and eventually becoming the spokesman for the L’art pour l’art movement of “purist” principles and the anti-utilitarian values. “Everything that is beautiful is useless,” he would write. He stood, in effect, in polar opposition to a figure like Nadar, who so eagerly embraced all the progressive materialism and technology of the age.
So for Gautier, a writer like Nerval provided wonderful ammunition in the critical war against the bourgeois, utilitarian, rational and progressive world. Nerval was, in effect, a source of marvellous copy, of journalistic anecdote. His strange actions, his picturesque travels, his weird fantasies made him almost the summation of the now familiar Romantic poet who defied every social convention. Nerval was someone whom Gautier could use: the ideal poet-victim for the age. He was also someone that Gautier, and other writers, might exploit to fulfil their own fantasies of the artistic life. From their position of success they could, consciously or unconsciously, exploit his failure. He was a gift, a martyr, a sacrifice to the cause: the lobster poet, lost in the deep.
From the outset, therefore, I was aware of the possible complications of Nerval’s story, and the distortions and deliberate myth-making I might have to encounter from his friends. But what I never realised—and had I suspected it for a moment I would have turned back—was the labyrinth that Nerval himself made of his life; a maze of fantasy and memory, from which a biographer might never escape. He too might be lost in a deep of his own making, and unlike the lobster might not be equipped with claws and carapace to survive.
I remember mentioning the lobster story to my friend Françoise, now herself a journalist, as we sat in her studio flat in the rue de Sévigné, just across from the rue Saint-Antoine where Nerval and Gautier went to school. Outside there was music from a small Turkish restaurant, and the bark of small dogs being taken on their evening promenade towards the quai. The buildings in this quartier were nearly all pre-Revolutionary, some even seventeenth-century, and the studio ceiling had bare old beams, as in an English country pub. The alcoves were stuffed with books mounted on bricks and planks, and lit with home-made lamps shrouded in blue and green shot-silk shades. From the little kitchen next door came the smell of coffee, lying freshly ground in its white paper filter, while the saucepan simmered on the gas.
“Tiens, le homard!” she exclaimed. “Pas très joli, un peu maléfique même.”
Why an evil influence? I asked, expecting some culinary joke.
“Tu ne connais pas le Tarot, alors” Françoise replied with a finger raised and one of her provoking grins.
The Tarot is a set of medieval playing cards, which are used to predict the future, or, more subtly, to analyse the state of your love-life or career. Much in fashion just then in Paris, the Tarot had rather the same status as the astrology columns in English newspapers and magazines, that gave you your “star reading”.
“C’est un peu comme le météo—c’est à dire, pas une science exacte.” She went over to one of the marine-lit alcoves and pulled out a small leather-bound book. “C’est numéro dix-huit dans L’Arcane Major, je crois.”
Number 18 was a card called The Moon. She handed over the book, and told me to read slowly, while she went to make the coffee. This is what I copied into my notebook:
Number 18, La Lune, the Card of the Moon and the Unconscious, the Irrational, the Feminine Mysteries, the Imagination. At the foot of this card lies a deep, mysterious pool, out of which a Crayfish or Lobster is attempting to crawl on to the dry land. A path leads up from the pool and twists like a ribbon towards the horizon. The path is guarded by two animals—in some Tarot packs these are both Dogs, in others they are a Dog and a Wolf. Further in the distance can be seen a pair of forbidding Towers, astride the path, which form a gateway to the mysterious regions beyond. Above, a full Moon hangs in the night sky. Drops of moisture like diamonds float in the air, as if being slowly drawn up from the Pool by the power of the Moon. The Lobster raises its claws from the water, and the Dog and Wolf lift their heads and bay at the Moon.
“C’est lugubre, n’est-ce pas, ton jardin d’homard?” called Françoise from the kitchen. I flicked on through the book, glancing at various commentaries on the symbolism and folklore of the cards. Number 18 had several longish entries, many of them concentrating on the Moon, its links with water and tides and fertility, and the ancient cults of Moon goddesses, Diana the Huntress, and the Egyptian divinity Isis associated with annual floodings of the Nile Valley. For the moment, none of this meant very much to me. Then I came across a footnote, printed under the heading, “Quest literature and the rite de passage, the 18th stage”. In this commentary, the poet’s lobster reappeared as a key image in the interpretation, and I was gripped by its weird connection with what I had already learned from Gautier and Nadar about Nerval’s last years in Paris before his suicide. It also seemed oddly like a warning. The footnote was in slightly archaic prose, as if taken from an earlier text:
The 18th card illustrates the dark realm of Hecate, the Night Hag, the Muse in her menacing Aspect. At the base of the picture is a Lobster or Crab (seventh sign of the Zodiac), an emblem of the primitive and devouring forces of the Spirit or Unconscious which have to be overcome. In the middle-distance are the Wolf and the Dog, guides to the Land of the Dead, who are also unstable and not to be trusted. Behind them are the stone pillars of Hades, the portals of the dark Womb, gateway both of Life and Death, the Underworld, the region of Sleep and Dream. Reigning over all is the great Moon, Queen of the Night, who draws the souls of the living towards her with the irresistible powers of enchantment or death.
The Hero is at the critical stage in his journey, where his existence hangs suspended in the balance. If he allows himself to be entranced by the glamour of the Moon, his quest is at an end. His life will be drained from him, until he is only a hollow shell. If, on the other hand, the Hero forces himself onwards, not straying from the narrow path, nor deceived by the spells and illusions all around him, he will eventually win through the dark land and the dismal cavern, and emerge into the light of new day.
This section of the commentary ended with a brisk valediction: “the negative meaning of the 18th card gives a warning against the dangers of the uncontrolled imagination, when fantasy is indulged in as a means of escape from the world of sanity and reality.”
I sat there for a long time, seeing the figure of Nerval and his lobster comin
g slowly towards me down the neat, geometrical gravillon pathways of the Palais-Royal. “Moi, je n’aime point les homards,” said Françoise standing beside me. “Ils ont quelque chose de monstrueux. Ils ont habités trop longtemps au-dessous de la mer.” But I was not to be warned.
That spring I left my hotel and my teaching classes, and moved into a little attic room, papered with asphodels, in the ninth arrondissement not far from the boulevard du faubourg Montmartre and the marché Cadet. It was a night-patrol from Cadet who had arrested Nerval in the street, on the first recorded outbreak of his insanity. So I felt I was on the spot. Gautier’s house in the rue de Navarin, now carrying a plaque as the first headquarters of the Société des Gens des Lettres, was also four minutes away, off the rue des Martyrs. This was one of the axis streets of bohemia, rising gently from Notre Dame de Lorette (who gave her name to the “lorettes”, or easy girls of the 1840s) to Pigalle, which became the artistic café-quarter of the 1890s, but is now lost to the neon. I embarked on an intensive period of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale, walking to and fro every day by the rue Cadet or the rue des Martyrs. My aim was simply to establish the outlines of Nerval’s career, and to begin with everything went well. In the evenings I bought fruit and vegetables at the marché Cadet, cold meat from the charcuterie at the corner of the rue Lamartine and drank cold beer in the rue Condorcet. In the library I imagined Nerval’s world; on the streets I studied it. Slowly the actors assembled.